> >Nobody was railroaded out. There was a short period when some hot-tempers
> >caused a few short-lived changes to the mail list. All members of the
> >IDNO are welcome on its mailing lists. But one should also not forget,
> >that like any other organization, the members are free to set the
> >membership criteria, just as all the other constituencies of the DNSO have
> >done.
>
> Karl, nicely said, but unfortunately the situation was rather more
> complicated and destructive.
>
> Minor items like an entire lack of documentation for the organizational
> details you cited -- which therefore led to ad hoc policy setting by the
> list owner, and even removing one list participant without their requesting
> it -- reflected sufficient confusion and contrariness to the
> organization's operation to suggest that it is nothing at all like an
> "individual domain name owners" constituency.
There is no doubt that the actions were made ad hoc and in the heat of
temper.
But then again, the Names Council excluded legitimate attendees and
observers in Berlin. And the GAC excluded entire countries.
Under the proprosed rubric, both of those bodies should now be banned
utterly from ICANN.
I might add, that ICANN itself has excluded, and continues to exclude,
legitimate parties from its processes by the simple act of closing its
meetings, a clear violation of its organic documents. By the logic being
suggested, ICANN itself should be suppressed.
> >By-the-way, what is wrong with a group that has questions about ICANN? Is
> >it the case that all you want in ICANN are sychophants and yes-sayers?
>
> Nothing wrong with having questions. That, however, was not what IDNO was
> devoting its list time to. It was simply engaging in bashing, and not even
> bothering to spend time in the details of its own formation.
Not true, we were formulating the membership policy. Those who refused
to be members were simply engaging in the Monty Python skit called "the
Argument" in which they simply engaged in blind, automatic, knee-jerk,
unconstructive contradiction of every step that the members were taking.
Although I did not agree with the steps taken, I do agree with Joop as to
the disruptive character of the postings which caused the situation to
develop.
> >It is amazing to see all the petty complaints being made about the IDNO
> >voting system.
>
> >It works. It has not been abused. And it is inexpensive to operate.
>
> How do you know it hasn't been abused?
Because the results are published and the votes accord with the rough
mental audit process that most of us do to validate that the results are
in line with what one would expect.
There is no evidence of fraud or of abuse.
As it stands the IDNO is the only body near or in ICANN that has a working
voting system.
That system has now been sucessfully used several times, including an
election on the IDNO's membership policy.
It is a sorry thing that so many are afraid of a simple thing called
"democracy" on the Internet.
--karl--
